If you are in the market for the fastest possible AMD graphics card and can’t afford the monster R9 295X2 then the Sapphire R9 290X Vapor-X OC deserves to be on your final shortlist.
We review a wide range of graphics cards every month, but no company have claimed so many awards as Sapphire in our labs over the last year. The reason is simple – Sapphire don’t cut any corners.
The triple fan Vapor-X cooler is the best on the market in regards to pure cooling performance. Sapphire support the excellent cooling system by overhauling the PCB and VRM cooling. They expose a copper layer on the board close to the 8 pin PCI connectors, then fit a heatsink direct to the copper layer – meaning that heat can be absorbed into the PCB from the GPU, then transferred out.
When you combine this with the adoption of mighty 10mm heatpipes, it is no wonder these cards are topping our thermal charts.
